Empty/Emptiness: that was a good way to describe Ghost’s feelings towards Annie Leibovitz. He did not dislike her work. How could he? Her photographs were beautiful images of beautiful people. But Leibovitz’s entire leviathan oeuvre was completely ignitionless. The question every image must answer is: Who gives a damn? Leibovitz’s answer to this question was obvious: her images are cultural documents. As such, they are the provenance of Cultural Studies, and as Ghost had learned from reading Walter Benjamin, Cultural Studies is an exercise in empty/emptiness.

When you go somewhere without your kid, you want her to be where you left her when you return. That's why parents have to take their kids to places instead of sending them alone. "What am I supposed to do?" I once said to a nosy fuss who suggested that my daughter could be dropped off at a movie and then picked up later. 'Come back and hope she's still there?"

That night discussing Jamison’s failed antiarrhythmic therapy and her cardiologist’s inability to pick up on her alcohol abuse wasn’t the first time I’d heard a doctor say, “When you’re a hammer, all you see is a nail.” Doctors often throw this phrase around when we explain missed diagnoses or a surgeon’s refusal to consider non-operative therapies or even a patient’s insistence that her headache is due to a brain tumor. But we’ve also employed this cliché to describe how we don’t turn off our doctoring outside the hospital or clinic. We wonder aloud if our neighbor has a pituitary tumor. We tell our uncle he will die of a heart attack before he retires if he doesn’t lose fifty pounds. We comment on the salt or fat or carbohydrate content of meals. We speculate on why some of our kids’ friends are always covered in snot.